


Matchmaker

by mediocre_kazoo_player



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Hints of tsumaki and oumugi, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 23:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17334590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediocre_kazoo_player/pseuds/mediocre_kazoo_player
Summary: There's only one steadfast rule in the department of shipping: love in Danganronpa is a one-way street.Tsumugi breaks four hearts.





	Matchmaker

Love is tender.  
  
Kaede passes through the hallway with Shuichi trailing behind her like a lost puppy. Two minutes later, she's doubled back on her path, marching through that same hallway with gusto as Shuichi follows her more hurriedly this time. Another two minutes later, they're back on their old course again, Shuichi scurrying beside her to keep pace despite being taller than her.  
  
Ah, to be young, Tsumugi thinks, despite being the same age as them, give or take a year. It's just that they're so innocent, so untarnished. Shuichi's crush is a schoolboy's crush.  
  
"Akamatsu-san, we should check that other classroom," he says, his loafers beating an allegretto into the cement floor. The way he looks at Kaede is sweet enough to make Tsumugi feel sick.  
  
"Oh! Right, I forgot about that one. Let's go!" Kaede, without even sparing a glance at him, turns on her heel and skips back the way they came from.  
  
Tsumugi is sure that Shuichi has read _Principles of Shipping_ before. It must be adrift somewhere in the bank of repressed memories piled together and sanctioned off in the back of his head, where his old self resides. He was a Danganronpa fanatic, after all.  
  
_Principles_ is barely a book. It's more of a pamphlet, primly concise, its pages fluffed out with charming diagrams illustrating ways to hurt people.  
  
Lovers separated by social status. By distance. By death. Lovers who are not loved back. (That's an important one.) Those are all ways to hurt characters, Tsumugi concedes. But the most important thing, the most important of all, is to hurt the audience.  
  
There is a bar chart in chapter 3 of _Principles_ that displays the average profit generated from official and fan-made merchandise of fictional couples by category. The lowest bar belongs to characters who are in an official relationship—a healthy one, already living out their happily ever after. The second-lowest: characters who are in an official relationship, but a strained one, with human imperfections. The third-lowest: characters who have separated from their partners for some reason or another; Tsumugi thinks that's a bit of a broad category, to be plainly honest. The highest:  
  
Characters who have unrequited affections.  
  
The popular theory is that the audience will feel an outpouring of empathy for the unloved, and, desiring resolution, will attempt to give their favorite fictional characters a happy ending with their pens and pencils and sketchbook pages and their wallets, of course. The more upsetting the relationship and the more sympathetic the character, the more merchandise sales go up. Danganronpa has this down to a science: take a sweet little unrequited crush and pile a gory murder on top of it.  
  
It's season fifty-three. Tsumugi can do this four times without getting caught. She crunches the numbers.  
  
Kaede goes flying. She looks like a kite soaring across the blue sky above, her blonde hair flattened against her scalp from the air pressure as she disappears, patterned skirt and black stockings and lace-up shoes, into the ceiling.  
  
Six hundred million yen for Akamatsu Kaede and Saihara Shuichi is Tsumugi's estimate.  
  
Shuichi screams, wordless, his outstretched hand grasping at a girl-shaped hole in the air. The camera focuses in on his face as a sound system with the same nice reverb as a metal bucket pisses out the first twanging chords of _Der Flohwalzer_.  
  
Seven hundred million yen for Akamatsu Kaede and Saihara Shuichi.  
  
Kaede as she was no longer exists. She has become Kaede the martyr, and in two days, three days, she will become a fantasy, an immortal beacon of hope etched into the spaces where Shuichi's heart has shattered. Not that it makes much of a difference, since she was already fiction in the first place.  
  
Tsumugi counts her victims.  
  
  
  
  
  
Love is patient.  
  
Himiko is not a morning person, to no one's surprise. Her small hand, so much like a monkey's paw, curls around the ceramic handle of a soup spoon as she gazes unseeingly into the thick swirl of cinnamon in her oatmeal.  
  
"—And that's why we should split the dining table in two! The degenerate males can all sit on their own side of the room. Right, Yumeno-san?" Tenko folds her hands, obediently waiting for a reply even though her voice overflows with a desperate need for approval. She looks like a dog at its watch post in front of the foyer windows, waiting for its master's car to pull up into the driveway.  
  
Himiko's head jerks up and down. Her eyes fog.  
  
And Tenko bursts with joy. "See! Yumeno-san agrees with me!"  
  
Himiko's head droops and her face meets the oatmeal left cheek first with a wet plop.  
  
"Yumeno-san?!"  
  
Tsumugi hides her smile behind a cup of hibiscus tea. The dining hall swells with laughter, Himiko snaps to attention with a disoriented mumble about not asking for an oatmeal face mask, and for a second, everything is okay again.  
  
Everything is okay again.  
  
The first time she heard the tale of Hachiko, Tsumugi was barely seven years old. She remembers that she was sitting at a square dining table that had just enough surface area to accommodate the three people who lived in her house: herself, her father, and her mother's ghost.  
  
She remembers her father, his sallow face grey with stubble. His chin grew pricklier with each month's difference between the calendar on Mom's office desk and the one hanging above his nightstand. It was her father who had told her that story.  
  
There once was a professor of agriculture named Hidesaburo Ueno. Ueno had an Akita dog named Hachiko, who was very loyal to him, and would always leave home to wait for him at the Shibuya train station. When the professor returned, presumably, Hachiko would perk up, tail wagging, and accompany him back to their house.  
  
Professor Ueno died on the twenty-first of May, 1925. He had a cerebral hemorrhage during a lecture and did not return to Shibuya Station that day. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next after that.  
  
Faithful Hachiko continued to wait for his master. For nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, Hachiko sat at the train station waiting for a man who would never come home. On the eighth of March, 1935, Hachiko died.  
  
Mom's slippers sat at the front entrance of the Shirogane household and collected dust bunnies for nine years.  
  
_Well, old man_ , Tsumugi thinks, from her vantage point near the banister where she can see Tenko waiting for Himiko to come down the stairs, _I guess I learned a thing or two from you._  
  
It's in the way they walk together, Tenko dashing ahead at first but pausing for a moment or two so that Himiko's short legs can catch up. It's the way Tenko lingers outside the Ultimate Magician's laboratory as Himiko finishes disassembling her practice performances, and it's in the way she slowly closes the door behind Himiko when they leave so that it doesn't slam.  
  
Tenko is always looking at the back of Himiko's bobbed hairdo, anticipating the day Himiko will turn around and look at her too.  
  
Tsumugi has always believed that hope can be a million times crueler than despair.  
  
When Chabashira Tenko dies, she does so on her hands and knees, patiently counting seconds that go by in the unmoving darkness, for Yumeno Himiko who does not come to save her.  
  
It doesn't rake in as much cash as Tsumugi's manager thought it would.  
  
  
  
  
  
Love is painful.  
  
Tsumugi spends half of each day in front of a bright screen plastered with little numbers. Today's viewer count. This season's total number of views. Projected total views by the end of the season. Merchandise sales. Ad revenue. Number of active discussions about today's episode on fifteen forums owned by Team Danganronpa, Incorporated. Graphs of these little numbers. All of this season's statistics juxtaposed with those of season 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, and so on and so forth.  
  
She needs to do better than last season, than the season before that, and the season before the season before that. Viewer retention is a scary little number to look at because it's not good. It hasn't been good since the 30s. Most of the time she chooses to ignore it and focus on the numbers with money symbols next to them; those are the ones that really matter.  
  
She needs to make those numbers go up. If she doesn't, Danganronpa will end. The world will end. The world will end.  
  
Sometimes, between two refreshes five seconds apart, there are numbers that don't change. Tsumugi's fingers twitch. She needs something big, something that'll rattle skulls, something that'll make the numbers leap and soar instead of climb slowly day by day. She needs it right now or she'll go crazy.  
  
There are formulas for this.  
  
The rival and the protagonist, a classic combination.  
  
Both male.  
  
Just like old times.  
  
Cupid's arrow is really a knife, Tsumugi decides. It's a close-range weapon. Making Kokichi fall in love is both more intimate and more violent of an experience than she would have ever wanted it to be.  
  
"Saihara-chan!"  
  
Tweaks to his script, bits of his personality and mannerisms that she pares off with the blade. Injecting the symptoms one by one. Training his heart rate to increase, training his pupils to dilate. Crippling one of his surreptitious post-trial investigations with a locked door that isn't supposed to be locked so that he can spend more time developing his feelings.  
  
"Ah, it's you..."  
  
There are manuals for this. Compiled studies of boys' love in popular media, complete with their own little numbers and graphs. Aggregate data of prior Danganronpa not-couples, of their generated sales, the mean extraversion and introversion of individual A and individual B, scores for agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. Effective discussion-generating lines of dialogue calculated from the number of times they appear in forum threads. The KomaHina model.  
  
"Eh? What do you mean, it's me? D-do you really hate talking to me that much?"  
  
Tsumugi pours her all into the Hotel Kumasutra sketch starring Hinata-type 3B and Komaeda-type 6A. Her desk is littered with notes about modern audiences' critical reception of the phantom thief trope. The numbers go up.  
  
"N-no, I—"  
  
The numbers soar.  
  
"Waaaaaahhhhhh! Saihara-chan hates meeeeeeeeeee!"  
  
She sinks the knife further, further in, buries it to the hilt, punctures Kokichi's beating heart. He bleeds, bleeds, bleeds out. Shuichi is there to bandage him up. The numbers fly.  
  
Tsumugi wonders how much further she can push him before something breaks. The way he loves Shuichi, it's like the rush of endorphins that comes after the bite of a razor blade. That's her fault.  
  
The last straw on the camel's back is the "I love you" she throttles out of him right before the fourth investigation. There's something oddly vulnerable about the way he says it, alone in an artificial world with no spectators except the digital shell of a dead girl. Something that makes her feel awful. She orders some production assistants to splice that clip onto the latest episode and decides that she's never going to watch it again.  
  
She doesn't even have to deal the killing blow. Shuichi does it for her.  
  
Tsumugi returns to her on-set dormitory room and takes out a copy of the promotional headshot of this season's Komaeda-type 6A. His purple eyes bore into her almost accusingly out of the paper's flat surface, as if he's already pinpointed her as the most blackened of them all. She takes a moment to gauge her symptoms: dilated pupils, increased heart rate, heightened oxytocin levels.  
  
Disgusting.  
  
There's a red marker in the pencil holder on top of her desk. She pops the cap off, hunches over that damned photograph, and circles every damned spot on his damned face she wishes she could kiss. When she's done, he looks like he really was executed alongside Gonta, a thousand bee stings warping his pretty smile.  
  
One point five billion yen for Ouma Kokichi and Saihara Shuichi. The tumorous pain spreading along the inside of her own chest is worth nothing at all.  
  
  
  
  
  
Love is a disease.  
  
There is no way Maki could know that she is just as sick as Kaito is. She's been living with her condition ever since she was conceived in a smoke-filled board room lined from wall to wall with character sheets. Tsumugi remembers the stench of their cigarettes and doesn't miss it.  
  
That room didn't always smell like the gray fog above a crowded ashtray. It used to smell like citrus. Citrus with an undertone of traditional medicine. She suspects that it was from the glass cleaner that the janitors used on the windows.  
  
That room was where she had started her summer internship at Team Danganronpa. Season 48. Writing department. None of her characters made the cut, to her shock and dismay at the time. Whatever.  
  
She was relegated to prop construction, as expected of a cosplayer. She wonders if she should have stayed there.  
  
Her favorite room in the studio building has always been the huge wardrobe full of beta costumes. Possibilities, thousands of them, that didn't make the final show. Many of them are her own hard work, long gowns and pleather jackets and sequined bodysuits that were deemed inferior to the final design or perhaps too risky for live TV. You can show off a bleeding corpse but not a nipple. Welcome to Danganronpa.  
  
More and more, she sits inside there to finish up her scripts, because it reminds her of those passionate days where she'd do nothing but sew and adjust and pick out fabrics that hung in great sheets from racks in an echoing warehouse. Those days where the next season was announced and she'd go rushing to her trusty old wardrobe to pick out rejected costumes she'd like to give a second chance. Those days where she could scream from the rooftops that Danganronpa was her life's work, her obsession—  
  
She would still die without it, but only perhaps because she doesn't know how to live without it anymore.  
  
Tsumugi sinks down against the wall, buried in between an oppressively wooly winter coat and a Rococo-style period dress. Looking at the screen of her tablet makes her eyes water and her head hurt, and remembering what kind of hell Kokichi and Kaito have prepared for her later today makes her want to fall into a convenient coma right here and now.  
  
It's at times like this that she decides to work on Maki.  
  
Maki, her black-haired, red-eyed goddess. Maki, lifted straight from the classics, a by-the-book tsundere and an ice queen with a heart of gold. An assassin with a sob story. An orphan, a walking cliché. Maki, as comforting and familiar as those old costume racks.  
  
Maki, who she gave away to a boy.  
  
She thought it'd hurt more, that decision. She thought it'd hurt to see Maki slowly sidling up to Kaito, defrosting in the perpetual sunshine of his presence, but it doesn't.  
  
It doesn't feel like anything.  
  
The illness blooms inside Maki, spins its cocoons, lines her lungs and stomach with butterflies. Tsumugi feels nothing. Kaito coughs up blood. Maki coughs up butterflies.  
  
Feeling nothing, Tsumugi fancies a brainless romance, one that won't tire her like any of the previous three. One that she can write with her eyes closed in the back of a musty closet.  
  
Love infects every inch of Maki's body. Love gnaws on her prefrontal cortex. Tsumugi leaves her to decay. There's nothing to say about this love because it's been done a hundred million billion times before and Tsumugi thinks a coma sounds really nice right about now.  
  
The fifth trial goes terribly, but Kaito is ripped away from Maki.  
  
The numbers go up.  
  
  
  
  
  
Tsumugi finds herself wondering from time to time what it feels like to face your own execution, to stand up there at the gallows waiting for it. The answer she finds doesn't satisfy her, but she doesn't lift a finger to complain.  
  
It feels like nothing.  
  
She's finished with her last stand. Danganronpa is over. There's no reason to go on, and a coma still sounds like a good idea. A great one, even.  
  
A few more seconds of Enoshima Junko for the audience to see. Then she can let go. Tsumugi feels the smile stretch tight across her face and just wants to sleep.  
  
The act slips. The audience can see her right now, her unenthusiastic expression and dead eyes. It doesn't matter anymore.  
  
The shadow of something large bears down on her, and she realizes that this must be the end.  
  
Among many other things, she thinks of the one-way streets she's built. Shuichi can't have Kaede, no. And Tenko can't have Himiko. Kokichi can't have Shuichi. Maki can't have Kaito.  
  
Tsumugi can't have Danganronpa.  
  
Love conquers all, doesn't it?  
  
_Splat._


End file.
